He was smart enough, at least, to keep from running off into the swamps by himself in search of them. It had been sheer luck that he’d found her the first time. He would, most likely, end up lost and starving or feeding some alligator or panther.
With Shako, he was safe. She could keep him safe. She hunted and caught fish. They cooked over a small fire and slept in peace under the trees.
After a while, he stopped asking how to get back.
CHAPTER 20
HE’D NEVER BEEN happier. He should have been dead.
Those two thoughts battled in his mind constantly, always pushing their way to the forefront of Simón’s thoughts. He was bathing in a creek with Shako, the cool water flowing over both their naked bodies, until he could not hold back any longer, and he took her in his arms as she laughed and smiled at him—and then he remembered, he should have been dead.
Or he would sit, brooding, in front of the fire they made each night, at the end of their foraging and hunting. His belly was full, but his thoughts were troubled, as he wondered what had happened to Narváez’s expedition, to the other soldiers, to his friends—and despite all that, Shako would look at him and a grin would break across his face.
She gave him a knife.
It was a small thing but a huge gesture of trust. She had found the broken point of his sword, sharpened it against a stone, and then mounted it in a bone handle for him.
He could finally help with the hunting and the cleaning and dressing of the game. He could defend himself if one of the panthers or bobcats came too close.
And he could slit her throat while she slept.
But she trusted him with it anyway.
It was the first gift he’d ever received that did not feel somehow paid for, either by humiliation or fealty or obligation. His father had given him bruises as a child, and repeated lessons in never trusting a drunk. His mother had died behind her eyes, and had nothing to give him. He had bought his first armor and weaponry himself when he went to war against the Moors, and everything he received since then he’d paid for with an oath to Narváez.
It was the most unselfish thing he had ever seen.
She did not seem to understand why he became so still, so reverent, when she handed it to him. But she looked into his eyes, and seemed to see something there.
They kissed for the first time.
He had been with a woman before. A whore in a brothel the night before his first battle. The older men in his company had taken him, and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. They did not want to follow a beardless virgin into battle. He wanted to convince them he was a man. It didn’t hurt that he was also very drunk.
Fortunately, it didn’t last long. She lifted her skirts and he pumped and was done in what seemed like seconds. He felt soiled and angry with himself as he paid her.
The next day he killed for the first time. That didn’t make him feel like any more of a man, either, but it felt more honest.
With Shako, it was different.
He’d had nothing but wanton thoughts from the moment he saw her, naked and free in the open air. Guilt kicked at him over and over as he tried to remember his vows as a knight in the king’s service and as a saved child of Christ.
It didn’t help much.
When they finally fell into each other’s arms, he thought he would shatter from how much he wanted her.
But he held back, forced himself to be gentle. There was no hurry. They had nothing but time and each other.
She put him on his back in the soft grass and straddled him. He ran his hands up and down her naked body, unable to look away. She smiled at him and took one hand and guided it, gently, down, helping him find the right place, and moving his fingers for him.
He held on, somehow, as she rocked back and forth, her skin closer and then farther, swaying over him. Then they locked eyes again, he saw her losing herself, and he could not take it anymore, he exploded, arms and legs shaking violently, spasming like a drowning man.
He was gone, far gone, from all the familiar landmarks and signs, lost in an unknown country, and his entire being was filled with happiness.
SIMÓN HAD KNOWN PRECIOUS little happiness in his life so far. He had a noble’s name, but a peasant’s upbringing.
His family had been given lands in southern Spain by a long-dead king that were overrun and abandoned when the Moors conquered most of the country. By the time Simón came along, the Oliveras were little more than a forgotten coat of arms and a few people living as impoverished guests on the land of another lord in the north.
Perhaps it was this constant reminder of their lack of wealth that made Simón’s father a drunk. Or perhaps it had been beaten into him by Simón’s grandfather, by all accounts a cruel man. But when Simón came of age, he found there was nothing to his inheritance but debts and empty wine barrels.
All that was left was the name, and whatever talent he possessed.
His talent, fortunately, was in war. He joined King Charles’s forces against the rebel Moors still living in Spain after the Reconquista, the long struggle to return the land to Catholic rule. His gift for strategy and an innate charisma inspired men to follow him and trust his judgment, despite his youth.
When the fighting was done, like thousands of other soldiers, Simón wanted to seek his fortune. He wanted to go to the New World, where explorers like Columbus and Cortés reported that gold lay on the ground for anyone to see, and the natives were docile enough to pick it up when ordered.
His record and reputation were enough to win him a command position under Pánfilo de Narváez, who had been granted the right to declare himself adelantado of all of the new land of Florida, to govern and collect tribute in the name of the king.
It seemed like destiny to Simón.
Destiny didn’t seem to agree, however. Narváez, a rigid, one-eyed man with a strong notion of his own importance, had not met with much success on his first trip to the Americas. He had been sent to rein in Hernán Cortés, who had overthrown the native Aztecs. The crown feared Cortés was setting himself up as a rebel lord half a world away from Spain.
Cortés defeated and humiliated Narváez, meeting him at the shore and forcing his surrender. He kept him prisoner for two years. Cortés then made his own peace with Spain—helped considerably by the vast amounts of Aztec gold he was now shipping back to the king—and was never punished for his treason. Narváez was eventually sent back to Spain in disgrace.
The expedition to Florida, and the wealth that was supposed to be there, was his reward for his suffering and his loyalty.
Things went wrong from the beginning of the journey, however. The king did not offer to pay for the expedition, and Narváez had to call in debts and spend his own fortune. They set sail with eight hundred men in four ships.
A storm in Trinidad sank two of the ships as they stopped for supplies. They were delayed again in Cuba as Narváez was forced to raise money to purchase two more. While trapped in port, the remaining soldiers and sailors ate their way through all of the expedition’s food before roughly half of them deserted the expedition entirely. Narváez was in a constantly foul mood, spitting about treachery and lack of honor.
Since his family came from Cuba, Narváez prevailed on old friends to extend him credit for his adventure. He was able to find two more ships, as well as a pilot named Miruelo, who claimed to know of a harbor almost as big as a sea on the east coast of Florida. Perhaps thinking he’d finally gotten some luck, Narváez made Miruelo the captain of a ship and the expedition’s navigator.
They sailed from Havana nearly a year after they’d left Spain, now down to four hundred men.
They were within sight of the Florida coast when a hurricane swept them up, seemingly out of nowhere.
Those few hours were the most terrifying of Simón’s life. The winds tossed the ships around like a toddle
r playing in a puddle. Horses and men screamed below the decks as Miruelo blindly turned up and down the coast, looking for the safe harbor he’d promised.
By the time he finally found it, three of the ships were floating wreckage. Men leaped from the decks with their armor and horses, and swam to shore in the pelting rain. Many never made the sand.
When the storm blew over, Narváez’s expedition was down to one barely seaworthy ship, a few provisions, and three hundred hungry and angry men.
They made camp on the beach, where Narváez read a proclamation on parchment paper, signed by the king himself. Simón wondered how it had managed to stay dry through everything.
He read that these lands were claimed in the name of King Carlos of Spain, and that by the right of God and the king, everything and everyone within it were under his dominion.
He promised mercy to those who would convert to the one, true, and Catholic church, and protection and justice.
“But if you do not do this,” Narváez intoned, “then by God, we shall enter your country and make war against you in every way we can. We will take you and your women and your children and make you our slaves. We will take all your property, keep what we can use and what we desire, and destroy and burn the rest. If you refuse to obey us, we will show you no mercy, and any deaths that result are your fault, not our own, for we have given you fair warning, here in the sight of God.”
Narváez looked around, as if anyone would challenge him.
Most of the soldiers were still dripping wet in the sand. No one said a word.
THE NEXT DAY, HE and his captains—including Simón—began to make their plans to conquer America.
Miruelo was ordered to repair the one remaining ship from the wreckage now floating in the bay and return to Cuba as fast as possible, to get more supplies and men.
Narváez would begin exploring the interior of the coast, sending men into the jungle to find the treasure they all knew was there.
Simón was given command of a squadron and a mostly blank map, with the order to march inland.
While his friends were still making camp on the shore, he set out with more than one hundred conquistadors, servants, and horses behind him. The trail into the jungle was easy and open, the weather clear and brilliant.
They walked a full day out of sight of the harbor without being assaulted by anything more than the insects that constantly buzzed around their exposed skin.
Then the savages came boiling out from between the trees, dozens of them, hundreds.
That’s where Simón knew he should have died.
There was no way around it. He had checked the skin where the arrow had pierced his thigh over and over, and there was not so much as a scar.
That wasn’t all. When he woke from his fever to find Shako tending him, he felt a lack of the aches and pains he’d previously thought were a constant part of life. A recurrent toothache that had plagued him for months on the journey across the ocean had disappeared. He’d been skin-and-bones thin when he went into the jungle. He had pains in his legs and a slight tremor in one arm where a Moorish arrow had punched through his armor back in Spain.
All of those old injuries and hurts were gone. He was fit and glowing with life.
And he was stronger. Faster. Better. He could bend the steel plate of his armor with his bare hands, leap a dozen feet from a standing start, and keep pace with the deer that ran through the swamp. He seemed to see and even think more clearly.
Shako would not explain. When he asked Shako about it, she would say only that she gave him medicine. In his limited understanding of the Uzita vocabulary, that could have meant anything from native herbs to sorcery.
She refused to say anything more. If he pressed the issue, it led to the only fights they would ever have. He would shout the only words he knew in her language, over and over. She would answer in monosyllables, in Spanish, which only infuriated him more, as if she was mocking him and his inability to make her obey, or even understand. Then she would simply walk away from him, sometimes for hours. At those times, he felt abandoned and lost in the wilderness.
Only once did she ever reply with more than a simple “No.” She said to him, “Isn’t it enough that you are alive?”
It should have been. She was right about that. But he wondered if it was true. At times he thought he was actually dead and this was Paradise, but it was nothing like the nuns and priests had described. It felt too real, and the pleasures were all pleasures of the flesh.
Somehow Shako had saved him. Remade him, better than ever.
And the happiness and the guilt were threatening to tear him apart from the inside out.
He had to know what she had done.
SIMÓN SCREAMED, AND SHAKO came running.
When she found him, a short distance away from their camp, he’d already tied a strip of his tattered shirt around his leg.
He didn’t have to explain. She sucked in a deep breath when she saw the rock nearby, and the tail of the snake poking out from underneath, the diamond-shaped pattern of its scales running up and down its back.
He looked up at her, a mute pleading in his eyes.
The rattlesnakes in the swamps were huge and fat and entirely deadly. Simón could delay the poison racing toward his heart by binding the wound—Shako had taught him that—but he could not stop it. They both knew he was in for an agonizing death. It might take days, or even weeks, but there was no undoing this.
Not by natural means.
Shako bent to one knee and kissed him hard on the mouth. In their pidgin of Spanish and Uzita, she told him not to move, not to fear. She would save him again.
“I know you will,” he said, and kissed her back.
She stood and went racing off into the jungle.
For a moment, Simón admired the way she moved, the muscles under her smooth flesh, her incredible grace as she disappeared behind the trees.
He had to get going if he didn’t want to lose her.
He dropped the cloth on the ground. The skin underneath was unmarked. The rattlesnake was real, and dead enough, but it had never come close to him. He’d searched for hours before he found the fat snake sleeping in the sun, and smashed its head with the rock.
Then he’d arranged the scene for Shako, and screamed at the top of his lungs.
He followed her into the jungle.
SIMÓN DIDN’T HAVE TO worry about losing her trail.
Shako ran in a panic, breaking branches and leaving footprints everywhere. He’d never seen her so careless.
She must have been terrified. For him. He shoved down the guilt that came with the thought. He had to know how he was alive. He had to know the secret.
Despite the distance from their camp, things began to look familiar to him. There was a kind of fever-dream quality to his memories. He heard the sound of water, echoing. He knew that sound. He had been here before.
He saw the cave, and it came rushing back. The pain, the confusion, and the surrender to the inevitable. Then the appearance of an angel, who took all the pain and fear away with one drink of water.
He saw her footprints in the soft, damp earth and followed them into the cave.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom after the Florida sun, but the trail inside was worn and marked. He followed it, and a different kind of light began to emerge: a blue glow that grew stronger as he made his way deeper.
Simón was well below ground when he found the pool. Its eerie blue light glowed off the roof of the cave, casting weird shadows in the rock and along the walls. There was nothing but the sound of the small spring, which flowed up from the cracks in the earth, filling the pool.
Shako kneeled before the pool at a well-worn indentation. She said something in words that sounded nothing like the Uzita she’d already taught him. She took a bowl from a stack. It was richly de
corated and covered in gold leaf—the only gold he’d seen in Florida so far.
She filled the bowl, muttered some more, and then stood and turned.
That’s when she saw him.
The bowl dropped from her hands.
The shock and betrayal on her face were so sharp he felt them like new arrows into his flesh.
With one part of his mind, he knew he had violated her and fouled the peace they had managed to create together, possibly destroying it forever.
But that barely mattered, as the rest of his mind understood what he had found.
“Mother of God,” he whispered. “Bimini.”
EVERY CONQUISTADOR KNEW THE legends, ever since the stories Ponce de León brought back with him from Columbus’s second voyage. The stories told of a spring that gave water that could cure any illness, heal any wound, and possibly deliver life everlasting.
The waters were supposed to be located in Bimini, a place that ranked second only to El Dorado in its elusiveness. De León had named an island in the Bahamas after the legend, but no one seriously believed the waters actually existed, especially since de León died like any other man a few years later.
But the legend persisted. Even the hardened veterans on Simón’s expedition, like Narváez, still spoke with a wistful desire of the Bimini waters.
Simón never believed the stories. He thought fresh, clean water was rare enough. He didn’t need to believe in a magic elixir of life.
But he could not deny the evidence of his own eyes, and his own body.
This was the Fountain of Youth. Simón had discovered the greatest treasure the world would ever know.
All it took was betraying the only woman he’d ever loved.
SHE WOULD NOT TOUCH SIMÓN.
There was a new distance between them after they returned from the cave and the Fountain. They spoke. They still hunted and ate and lived side by side, but she never allowed him to get too close again.
He recognized, once more, how limited their vocabulary was, in both number and meaning. So much of what Simón and Shako had was encoded in touch, in a physical language of proximity and feeling. Without that closeness, he now felt as if he was trying to reach a faraway island by throwing stones at it, hurling one empty word after another.
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